Month: March 2019

Using bookmarks in Power BI help you capture the currently configured
view of a report page, including filtering and the state of visuals, and later
let you go back to that state by simply selecting the saved bookmark.

You can also create a collection of
bookmarks, arrange them in the order you want, and subsequently step through
each bookmark in a presentation to highlight a series of insights, or the story
you want to tell with your visuals and reports.

In this post we’ll quickly go over
how to create a few bookmarks and view them as a slideshow if you will.

I’m going to use my March Madness Report I created in an earlier post. Once my report is opened in Power BI Desktop, I’m going to click on the View tab in the ribbon and select “Bookmarks Pane”

Bookmarks Pane

This should bring up a new Bookmarks pane inside PBI Desktop:

Bookmarks

Remember, bookmarks are used to capture the current view of the report so I’m going to use the default view where I’m showing all data and I’m going to name the bookmark “Home”. Make sure all filters are selected to show all data and click Add under the bookmark pane. This will create a new Bookmark, named Bookmark 1. Click the ellipsis and select rename to rename the bookmark appropriately.

Next, I like North Carolina, so I’m going to go to my Team Filter and choose North Carolina which will show me data for only this team.

Team Filtered Power BI Report

In my bookmark pane, I’m going to click Add again and rename to North Carolina.

Next, I want to view data on North Carolina from 2000 to present so I’ll change the Year Filter.

Team and Year Filtered Power BI Report

In my bookmark pane, I’m going to click Add again and rename to North Carolina 2000-present.

Now, if I click on any of bookmarks,
it will take me to the data that was saved for each. This is a great way to
present data in a meeting/conference so you don’t have to manually change the
filters during the engagement.

We can also click the View button in the Bookmark pane to view a slideshow using the arrows at the bottom to navigate:

I wrote a post a few weeks about creating an Azure Windows VM so wanted to follow up with a post about creating an AWS Windows VM to compare both platforms. I like Azure and AWS so I’m not going to throw either one under the bus. Both are great and easy to use.

Let’s create an AWS (EC2) Windows VM.

Log into the AWS portal and click on EC2 under All Services, Compute:

AWS Management Console

Next, click Launch Instance:

AWS Create Instance

Step 1 allows you to choose an Amazon Machine Image or AMI. There are tons of options here, but for this post, I’m going to use Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Base

Windows 2019 Base

Once I click Select, I’m brought to Step 2: Choose an Instance Type. Instance Types comprise varying combinations of CPU, memory, storage, and networking capacity and give you the flexibility to choose the appropriate mix of resources for your applications. Each instance type includes one or more instance sizes, allowing you to scale your resources to the requirements of your target workload. More info here: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/

For this post, and for cost sake, I’m going to use the free tier t2.micro type which is 1 CPU, 1GB RAM

Number of Instances – This is the number of servers you want to create. If you need 5 of the same servers, this makes it easy.

Spot Instances – A Spot Instance is an unused EC2 instance that is available for less than the On-Demand price. Because Spot Instances enable you to request unused EC2 instances at steep discounts, you can lower your Amazon EC2 costs significantly. The hourly price for a Spot Instance is called a Spot price. The Spot price of each instance type in each Availability Zone is set by Amazon EC2, and adjusted gradually based on the long-term supply of and demand for Spot Instances. Your Spot Instance runs whenever capacity is available and the maximum price per hour for your request exceeds the Spot price.

Subnet: the range of IP addresses in your VPC that can be used to isolate different EC2 resources from each other or the internet.

Auto-assign Public IP – requests a public IP address from Amazon’s public IP address pool, to make the server reachable from the internet.

Placement Group: You can launch or start instances in a placement group, which determines how instances are placed on underlying hardware. When you create a placement group, you specify one of the following strategies for the group:

Cluster – clusters instances into a low-latency group in a single Availability Zone

Partition – spreads instances across logical partitions, ensuring that instances in one partition do not share underlying hardware with instances in other partitions

Spread – spreads instances across underlying hardware

There is no charge for creating a placement group. Learn more: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/placement-groups.html

Capacity Reservations – enables you to
reserve capacity for your Amazon EC2 instances in a specific Availability Zone
for any duration. This gives you the ability to create and manage capacity
reservations independently from the billing discounts offered by Reserved
Instances (RI). By creating Capacity Reservations, you ensure that you always
have access to EC2 capacity when you need it, for as long as you need it.

Shutdown behavior – specifies what happens
when an OS level shutdown is performed.

Enabled termination protection – You can
protect instances from being accidentally terminated. Once enabled, you won’t
be able to terminate the instance until this option has been disabled.

Monitoring – Monitor the instance with
Amazon CloudWatch.

Tenancy – You can select to run your server
on a shared server or a dedicated server.

Elastic Graphics – Enables graphic
acceleration.

For this post I’ll use defaults and click Next.

Step 4 is Add Storage.

I’m not going to go over each Storage option, but you can get more info here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/Storage.html?icmpid=docs_ec2_console

AWS Storage

Selecting default and clicking next.

Step 5: Add Tags.

Like Azure, A tag consists of a case-sensitive key-value
pair. For example, you could define a tag with key = Name and value =
Webserver. A copy of a tag can be applied to volumes, instances or both. Tags
will be applied to all instances and volumes

Click Next.

Step 6 is Configure Security Group

A security group is a set of firewall rules that control the traffic for your instance. On this page, you can add rules to allow specific traffic to reach your instance. For example, if you want to set up a web server and allow Internet traffic to reach your instance, add rules that allow unrestricted access to the HTTP and HTTPS ports. By default, the RDP port is added, but it allows all IP addresses to connect. Changing the Source column will allow you to filter what IP’s are able to RDP into the server. For this post, I’m going to change the Source column to allow “My IP”

AWS Security Groups

Next…and last page is a summary of the options selected. To finish configuring the instance, click Launch.

AWS EC2 Summary

After clicking launch, you will see a popup where you can create or use an existing key pair. A key pair consists of a public key that AWS stores, and a private key file that you store. Together, they allow you to connect to your instance securely. For Windows AMIs, the private key file is required to obtain the password used to log into your instance. For Linux AMIs, the private key file allows you to securely SSH into your instance.

Once the new VM is created, you can go back to the EC2 dashboard and click on Instances to see the new VM:

The first line (Order Date Title = “Sales For “ &) is basically naming the measure and adding the beginning text for the title. The second line (MIN ( FactInternetSales[OrderDate] ) & “ to “) is finding the minimum order date from FactInternetSales.OrderDate and then adding the “to” text.The last line (MAX ( FactInternetSales[OrderDate] ) is finding the maximum order date from FactInternetSales.OrderDate.

This one was pretty easy. Once I’ve typed my DAX, hit the checkmark to make sure there are no errors and the click off screen.

DAX

Our measure has been created! Let’s go back and find it under the FactInternetSales fields pane.

Power BI Fields

Next, let’s click on the Card Visualization and move and size it appropriately to fit in our title space.

Card Visualization

While the card is highlighted, click on the new measure from the Fields pane and it will populate the card with the measure we created.

The only thing left to do is format the title and we’re all set! If we change the Order Date Slicer, you’ll notice the title changes with the date. See live example at the beginning of this post.